Hello, just checking in again for a response.
Allowing TurboActivate for Virtual MachineAnswered
Dear LimeLM,
Thanks again for your great product, I have found it works very well and is intuitive to use.
We have a user who is not on a virtual machine but TurboActivate thinks they are. They are on a University system computer and their IT department assures me none of the relevant settings (as described in your documentation) are activated. Nonetheless the user has tried everything and so we are looking for a workaround.
In this case we would like to provide the user a TurboActivate key with virtual machine activations permitted. This key has a license expire date with a 2-month license and the server is contacted every week (DAYS_BETWEEN_CHECKS).
As I don't have much experience with virtual machines I would just like to 100% confirm that:
1) This license could be used with many virtual machine instances on different computers and so presents a security issue. However, worst-case scenario this cannot be used in perpetuity because all versions of the software using this license will loose access once the license expire date passes.
2) This security issue can be closed at any point by disallowing VM activations on the license key, in which all potential copies of the software running on virtual machines will loose their activation the next time the license server is contacted.
Many Thanks
Answer
The “Why is TurboActivate saying the customer is inside a Virtual Machine, but the customer says they're not?” article has been updated with new methods.
If you’re using the latest TurboActivate and it says they’re in a VM, then they’re in a VM. We err on the false negative.
As far as downside of using TA on a VM, it’s covered here: https://wyday.com/limelm/help/vm-hypervisor-licensing/
Thanks Wyatt I will look at the new methods in the FAQ cited.
I appreciate the documentation which is thorough, but does not directly address my specific concern (albeit it follows almost directly, but when the consequences of mis-understanding are significant I would like to be 100% sure):
Q: If a key is set to allow VM and a user copies their VM and distributes with the software, essentially creating free versions, this can be immediately dealt with by setting the key back to not allowing VM / revoking the key / the license expire date passes?
Many thanks.
Yes. But you won’t know if they‘ve cloned the VM. That’s the point.
That‘s why we recommend TurboFloat on VMs because it handles this situation by default.